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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Obama’s Plan to Improve Science Education by Overworking Teachers

It is perplexing
to many that we continue to have high unemployment and simultaneously have to
import foreign workers to fill so many high tech jobs because of the dearth of
sufficiently educated domestic workers. There have been numerous attempts to
rectify this problem, but they all suffer from similar fallacies such as the
myths that our education system is broken or deteriorating or that our teachers
are terrible or disinterested or unwilling to persevere in the profession.

Indeed, 30,000
STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers leave the profession each
year according to Good
Education and this, no doubt, takes a terrible toll on the consistency and
integrity of STEM programs. However, K-12 education loses thousands of teachers
each year from all disciplines, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with
the needs and specifics of STEM teaching. For example, over
100,000 teaching jobs have been lost in the last year, while over 300,000 have
been lost since 2008, according to Fire Dog Lake, primarily due to budget
cuts resulting from declining tax revenue.

Furthermore,
significant numbers of teachers from all disciplines quit within their first
three years because they were not sufficiently prepared or are no longer
willing to deal with the demands, stress and intensity of the job. And, as Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog
pointed out last year, the attrition rates in other professions are also relatively
high and this may actually be a good thing, especially for K-12 education, as
it helps weed out those who are ill-prepared or ill-suited for the profession.

Of course it’s
not just about retaining STEM teachers. It is also about attracting them to the
profession in the first place. STEM graduates tend to have more remunerative
options than humanities and social science graduates, like working for a
biotech or software company. To this end, the White House announced last week
the creation of an elite STEM Master Teacher Corps, the members of which will serve
as models and inspiration for aspiring young STEM teachers, according to the
Good Education report.

The Obama
plan will begin this year with 50 teachers, expanding to more than 10,000
teachers over the next four years. These "master teachers" would be required
to lead professional development and school reform efforts in their schools and
districts, create lesson plans and novel strategies to improve their peers’
teaching, and mentor novice teachers to help keep them in the classroom. In
exchange for all this extra labor, the “master teachers” will receive a
national award recognizing their excellence and a stipend of $20,000 per year.

The Good
Education article suggests that while the stipend “might not put them on par
with a hot programmer at Google, the compensation will close some of the gap
and make their salaries competitive with other careers they might be qualified
for.”

Now $20,000
might seem like a substantial sum of money, particularly when many teachers are
making only $40,000 per year (or less). However, for a teacher earning
$30-40,000 per year base pay, their new salary would hardly be competitive with
the IT or Biotech industries. Furthermore, Good’s estimation looks only at the
take home pay, not the amount of pay relative to the amount of labor, status
and stress.

The typical
workload of a teacher includes managing and controlling classrooms of up to
35-40 students while identifying and serving their diverse and unique needs.
This, alone, accounts for 5-6 hours (66-80%) of a teacher’s workday. In the
remaining time, teachers must design and prepare creative and effective lesson
plans; set up labs and projects; read and grade essays, lab reports, exams and
other assignments; attend meetings; fill out reams of paper work; satisfy the sometimes
contradictory and often overwhelming demands of administrators and local and
state ordinances; and regularly communicate with parents. During this time, they
have dozens of intense interpersonal interactions, generally with people who
are not very good at articulately or respectfully communicating their needs,
thus adding stress and frustration to an already overwhelming work day.

Considering
these demands, all teachers, regardless of their discipline or location, should
be earning six-figures as their base pay, without having to do a lot of extra
work, as required by Obama’s STEM plan.

While it is certainly
nice to be offered extra money for extra work, $20,000 does not come close to
compensating teachers for the amount of work required by Obama’s STEM program.
Mentoring novice teachers, alone, could add another 5-10% to a teacher’s already
busy workday, especially if it includes frequent observations and meetings to
debrief the observations. Curriculum design, too, can be extremely time
extensive. Many teachers devote entire summers and/or additional hours after
school (without pay) to curriculum design. Likewise, school redesign and reform
efforts can eat up weeks or months during the summer, followed by additional daily
or weekly labor during the school year.

It should
also be pointed out that all this extra work can burn teachers out, taking away
attention, patience and focus from their students. Many teachers no doubt have
the energy and drive to make this work in the short-term, but the Obama plan
calls for a minimum four-year commitment. It is difficult to imagine 10,000
martyrs across the country not only being able to give up so much of their
personal lives to the cause of improving STEM education for four or more years,
but being able to do it well, without sacrificing the wellbeing of their
students and colleagues.

Under the
Obama plan, STEM teachers will still to have relatively low status and autonomy
(like other teachers), thus contributing to high attrition and difficulty
attracting people to profession in the first place. They will continue to be subjected
to arbitrary and ill-conceived reforms and legislation (e.g., No Child Left
Behind, Race to the Top), attacks on their working conditions and job security (e.g.,
tenure and evaluation reform), and little to no academic freedom and autonomy
in the classroom. They will also continue to be subjected to unreasonable
expectations to solve major socioeconomic problems that are beyond their
capabilities (like ensuring that low income 9th graders who are reading
at the 2nd grade level are able to graduate on time ready to enter a
four-year university).

This brings
up another faulty premise of the Ed Deform movement: Kids aren’t graduating
prepared for career and college because of defects with their schools or
teachers. In reality, the minority of students who are not graduating on time
or who are graduating without the necessary basic skills for career or college
are overwhelmingly low
income students who started kindergarten far behind their peers in pre-reading
and math skills and who fell further behind as they progressed through
school, not because of bad schools or teachers, but because their more affluent
peers had a host of after-school and summer advantages that were unavailable to
them.

Therefore,
if we want to see more students graduating prepared for STEM careers or college
we need to address both the increasing poverty of our students and the growing societal
wealth gap, as well as the declining revenue available to K-12 education, since
education funding can help ameliorate some of the negative educational impacts
of poverty (e.g., free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs; after school
childcare for young children of working parents). A much more effective use of
the $100 million the Obama administration plans on spending on his STEM program
would be to increase funding for programs like free and reduced lunch,
restoring nursing and counselors to the schools, and adding more after-school
and summer enrichment programs for low income children.

This, of
course, is unlikely. First, virtually no policy maker acknowledges how much
poverty affects educational outcomes and none is willing to invest in programs
that reduce poverty, let alone tax the wealthy to do so. Furthermore, the STEM
push is coming primarily from industry which wants greater control of its
future workforce and increased consumption of its products. It’s not about
helping children, especially poor children.

In the
short-term, increased STEM education means more computers and iPads in the
classroom, which means more profits for tech companies. In the long term, even
if it does result in companies hiring more domestic employees, it will be
primarily the elite upper echelon of public K-12 educated students who reap the
benefits of high paying, high status tech jobs, as it is today. Lower income
kids who are behind in their academic skills and course work will continue to
have lower graduation and college admission rates, higher unemployment, and
fewer job opportunities. Having better trained science teachers will not erase
the effects of poverty, improve students’ reading from the 2nd to 11th
grade level, or provide a safe, quiet place for them to study.